blog.postmodernvillage.com

Jillian is a talented individual. She can exist in any time period and geography, be it Ancient Rome, the Spanish invasion of South America, Victorian Era England, American Colonialism, or present day. She has the added abilities of communicating with the past and changing genders. For a couple of years I’ve been writing poems about Jillian, letting her swing freely from the treetops as she rehearsed the role of Juliet in a high school play, trekked across the wilderness to farm the unsettled plains, wrote imprudently steamy letters while servants starched her linen. But now it’s time for this monkey to evolve already.

Immortality would be icky. An Everywoman—booooring. Specificity is needed here, like a “Jillian memeplex” that is replicating its cultural inheritance across both time and continents in order to comment with consistency on whichever cultural environment it encounters. Can Jillian be Jillian without being Jillian at the same time? I think memes are the answer here, but what do my po-mo’s think?

Yet again my students prove they cannot listen—that simply hearing is beyond them. They must be distracted because otherwise they might actually start thinking about something in the world around them, or, worse yet, they might start thinking about something in the past or something in the world that is not immediately around them, maybe something from a cubicle or from a rat-infested Mumbai slum. They might accidentally think about some massive machine slowly leaking fluid onto a factory floor. They might realize there’s a price somebody else pays for their comfort or that others unknown pay for their suffering. Aside from the children of the very rich, the children of America’s middle class are the most privileged beings on the face of the earth. They—which is to say “we,” as I was one too—do not suffer in the sense that others do, from famine or war or the violence and paranoia of political oppression. Yet any one of them will moan of a terrible life, of privation from all that’s holy and cool, of a series of arbitrary parental usurpations of rights and entitlements. He’ll also tell you that the poor just don’t work hard enough, that the wealthy have all earned what they have, that the smart are far from cool. They’ll tell you that they’re all going to be basketball stars and captains of industry, rappers and designer clothing moguls, actors and celebrities-without-portfolio, that the future is boundless and full of glory on the court, the screen, and the stage.

The American adolescent is a creation of marketing. No one is more sure of who she is than the American adolescent, and one of the things she’s sure of is that she’s “finding herself,” that this is a “difficult” and an “awkward” age. He knows this because he’s been told it. She knows what she is supposed to listen to on her iPod, indeed that she should be listening to it on an iPod. Jazz is off-limits, classical is for commercials when an air of sophistication is meant to be portrayed. Everything is better with a hip-hop beat. These are a people sure that carpenter pants are out for now and that ripped jeans are back in. They know precisely what’s bad or ugly or old skool and precisely what’s hawt and new; though they may very well disagree on the particulars, that does not change the precision of their opinions.

The American adolescent wears his neediness like an American Eagle t-shirt that she changes from day-to-day. She wears it as a badge of her hurt and her vulnerability which she’s sure of because that is part of what’s packaged as adolescence. Margaret Meade may have been the first to recognize adolescence as a Western concept, but now we must wrangle with it as a product of marketing. Adolescence is an exploitation of the indulged offspring of the middle class, whose buying power itself is a projection of the status of their parents. The best training they’ll ever get in being consumers happens here, and as such it is a de facto right of passage. Here is learned that there is no distinction between their best interests and their “style,” that individual style is a definition of self, and, because of this, that there is no distinction between political liberty and consumer choice. This pattern is maintained long into, if not throughout, adulthood, with style and image-creation largely supplanting personality. Image is a boon to marketers, since it must be continually updated, continually groomed for the next life stage.

And so Americans don’t develop much until they are in their 20s, and may not develop at all, or may never develop past their glory days of being marketed-to at 16 or 17 or so. This is not here, as it may be in some societies, a detriment. It may even be an asset. The current president of the United States was elected precisely for his adolescent brashness, bullheadedness, and peevishness, all of which we find endearing.

The irony is that many Americans who view themselves as most grown-up are the ones who encourage and promote perpetual adolescence: America’s conservatives. Conservatism in America is associated with fanatical militantism, intolerance, black-and-white thinking, an absolute hatred of ambiguity, and an unswerving faith in marketing and in the private sector generally. It also worships power, and so American conservatives encourage in their children behavior that would be seen as outré in most civilized societies: bullying, schoolyard vigilantism, unwarranted aggression of the field of play. Indeed, American football can be seen as perhaps the condensation of the American conservative ethic; it is hierarchical but also anarchical, violent, competitive for its own sake, and reliant on a purely externalized set of purposes and goals. It is no surprise that many notable American conservatives are football fanatics, from Patton to Nixon to Condoleeza Rice. This is something they share with many male American adolescents.

The confluence of politics and marketing creates perpetual consumers, perpetual adolescents, and a group of people absolutely certain of what they’re about, as their values-as-lifestyle-choice are reinforced at very turn. That we would blunder into Iraq the way we did, and that this particular president would do it, should not surprise us at all.

Comparison Disc Poems, Spring 2008

Short Skirt, Long

Cake is easy as rising,
yeasty as soda, long
as the jacket covers,
a barely-skirted bum,
as sweet as sweat in fluid
neon light-curves of rave.

Sweet Jane

Your smile, purled by one
tiny stitch—older, you’d regret
the lines left, traces of joy,
traces of pain.

Ice

Cheese, even then, poof-cake, but
despite all that cool in the white-kid-from-the-suburbs
kind of way that perpetual adolescence reinvents
adolescence as perpetually cool.

Under Pressure

For your pleasure the street, the pressure
of the yes but squished into a baseline, a trans-
Atlantic fright, stretched from London to the sparkling
New York sidewalk mica—humanity, finally, is geology.

What “U” Can’t Touch

Hammer hit harder than we recall, but slammed,
mostly, his own fingers, and, lamed now, preaches
what perhaps all along should have been: the Gospel
according to Hammer, M.C.

Superfreak

An unlikely subject for the soul: the girl you don’t
take home to mother, but the one you most want
to be with when you’re with the one you will.
Even her toenails make a scene. But such is obsession: the most
interest is, after all, the prurient.

Spanish Harlem

No love is innocent, not even that rose, picked
so to grow: in my garden is possession, the “special,”
one of dreams, the stem of a blossom from the deepest
place imaginable, Spanish Harlem, the exotic within;
the depth of dreams is the bloom of sex, the blush
of id in broad day.

Blues for Johann

The writer of the Coffee Cantata must have been blue,
the organist who fathered a nation
of notes and played into perpetuity, who, dutifully,
fulfilled every Sabbath’s obligation for music
for a measure of grain and a casket of beer.
Melancholia and introspection are intertwined,
the epigenetics of existence, the essence
of worship, a dedication that is meditation,
a tonic for the unworthy, the blessed grazing
safe in the fields of the great masses,
the unwashed.

The Singleness of the Eye

—a sculpture by Paul Friesen, 1981

Matthew 6:22

The eyes don’t face north. All three face up on their limestone pillars of optic nerve. Two also face east into rebirth, one also south into the prevailing wind.

Cobwebs glisten between the pillars.

Gash marks denote the flecks of iris radiating into half-moons of eyes side-on. The pupils are represented by open spaces—tubes carved out of the blond stone. The openness is their receptivity, the “light of the body,” the “body full of light,” by the absenting of the rock.

A shadow now draws across the easternmost pupil.

The southern pillar is cracked a foot up the base, its outer patina of stone peeling away, proving there is no “wholeness,” or rather, that wholeness is only a result of impermanence.

A diaphanous seed pod clings to the easternmost eye.

Despite what my conservative friends say, I actually cleave to few radical notions, but one idea that they and their moderate brethren would consider pretty offensive follows. If we are to survive as a nation, as an economy, as a civilization, perhaps even as a species, we need to have an almost complete reversal in how we value success.

Economists have in mind that success is not measured by profitability but by the continual growth of profitability. When the Chairman of the Federal Reserve assesses the fiscal health of the nation, he looks at indices like the Dow and the S&P and the GDP and asks if they are getting bigger, not if they are holding steady. This idea fits in very well with a speculative market, one that generates as much or more of its wealth off of the movement of money as it does from the production and delivery of services and goods. A speculative market essentially assumes, though, that those goods and services, while sometimes in flux, will always be in some sense available, that the “invisible hand” will automatically shrink those markets that are in decline and open up new ones that aren’t. So $100 a barrel oil doesn’t bother the market all that much as there’s as much money to be made in trading in its futures as there is in its heres and nows, maybe more.

But this is also where the speculative market has it all wrong. It simply does not know what to do with zero. It can handle less, and it can handle more, but it cannot handle none. At some point, those goods and services actually need to be produced and rendered, and if there’s no oil to fuel production and transportation, the whole thing collapses like a card house in an air raid.
Thus it ever was with civilizations that develop around a single source of energy. For the pre-Columbian cultures of Meso-America, it was corn; for us it’s oil. Failure of the single fuel source equals collapse. The market cannot seem to get its head around the fact that all that money it makes from speculation will be useless when the civilization that determines its value, that supplies its shoe shops and airplane factories and movie theaters, is no longer around.
The only way to avoid this situation is not just to fuel the market with a new energy source, as the market will lock-up just as suddenly when we reach the new fuel’s capacity as well. The way to solve the problem is a transvaluation of the value of what it means to be successful. The whole idea that markets should continually grow is itself the root of the problem. Whether it is fueled by oil or corn or dilithium crystals, our current market model will always assume a continual rise in production and consumption that will always deplete resources.

Simply put, “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron.

But make no mistake: the desire for continual growth is a value. There is nothing universal or natural about it. In fact, we have a term for continual, unchecked growth: we call it cancer. When anything metastasizes, it threatens the life of the host. Our host is the Earth.
From an anthropological perspective, an economy is simply the means by which a culture survives in its environment. By this standard, our current economy is dysfunctional, as it will lead inevitably to the collapse of the culture. In a sense, we do not have an economy that supports a culture; we have a culture that supports an economy.

Much the same could be said of Feudalism or Communism as practiced by the Soviet Union. These were systems destined to fail because they confused the tool for the goal, or they subsumed their entire culture into an ideology that was itself expressed through an economy. Our own situation is much the same. Recently, I heard someone from an anti-tax PAC complain about a proposed rise in taxes on the ultra-wealthy managers of hedge funds by arguing that such a tax was antithetical to a “capitalist system,” and that the government had no right to tax at all. Besides the obvious practical problems this might cause if we should adopt this man’s ideology, the whole notion that our entire economy should be beholden to this ideology is dangerous beyond sense. Hedge fund managers’ activities are actually harming our economy overall while making the managers and their clients incredibly wealthy in the process. The proposed tax was meant to make up for a federal income gap caused by a proposed alleviation of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is set to hit the middle class especially hard. By cleaving to his ideology, the anti-tax zealot would take money out of the hands of millions who spend it locally and put it in the hands of the rich few who, chances are, wouldl use it to gamble on more risky investments.

This illustrates that our current system is about values, not market fundamentals—indeed, market fundamentals are a direct offshoot of our values. There is no natural law of the marketplace because markets are not natural; they are technologies, essentially, created by cultures as applications of a certain type of adaptation to an environment. Best done, they change with environmental conditions in such a way as to further the chances a culture has of surviving. In this case, they are defective since they are doing just the opposite. But at the heart of the current market is a value which says that continual growth is ideal; this is a value based, to put it bluntly, on greed. If we wish to create a system that is truly sustainable, we must first change our values to reflect that. The end product will not resemble the marketplace we have now, and indeed it cannot, as what we have now threatens to destroy itself and take us with it. This does not mean that we cannot live a lifestyle that somewhat resembles the one we have now, simply that the new economics must be based on a different basic value, one not synonymous with continual growth, one that values sustainability and views too much growth as a sign of failure. This system would necessarily punish greed, or at least sanction it socially.
A careful reader might argue that greed, or she might even call it “self-interest,” is a natural part of being human. Markets, she might argue, simply harness this tendency and create wealth. This may be true, but people are also naturally murderous, thieving, filled with lust, and mad for power. This does not mean our culture needs to countenance a certain amount killing, larceny, rape, or enslavement just because it is, on some level, good for us. We’ve decided, and rightly so, that these things are on the whole much worse than they are cathartic or useful, even though they keep police departments in business. Likewise, when our greed—pardon me, our “self interest”—becomes more destructive than constructive, it must be reined in. “Wealth” may be considered anything a culture derives from an environment beyond what is needed to meet a basic need. Thus wealth is never “created” as such: resources are exploited beyond supplying a basic need. “Wealth,” then, becomes a function of our values, what we want more of than the minimal amount required for us to survive. A million tons of slime-mold does not make a man wealthy, but a million tons of amethyst does. Both are about as useful. One is simply valued by human beings more than the other one is. Markets do not decide what something is worth; people do. If we reward people for how much they conserve instead of how much they use, the naturally greedy would be harnessed to the goal of conservation, but then, they would also be measuring wealth in a completely different way.

I don’t expect any change in values to happen while most of us are still alive, of course. It will probably only happen as the result of systemic collapse and rebuilding. The way to change the values of a society is generally through the destruction of that society and its rebirth or through the death of those who hold those values. We cling to our cultural values to maintain our sense of self, and either we die or the culture dies if those values are to be transformed. I fear it shall be both, but that the former shall precede the latter, and it shall happen as a result of the expression of the old values until the cold, chaotic, and bitter end.

Making sense means less than it used to. “Means” has sort of lost its flavor as well. Semantics have fallen out of favor; a groundswell has swollen away with reason as entirely too much expectation for any one of us to handle. Rationality is a dodo bird, and logic–even simple logic–doesn’t candle-up to the infernal motions of the viscera. We’ve emasculated sense, disowned sensibility, and cowed moderation into a reactionary pose. We’ve hosed off the faint patina on the face of good judgment, exposing the weeping infant beneath.

And how far has all this gotten us? Well, it’s made us rich, a few of us, and stitched the rest in debt, and lied them with a manager.

by Special Correspondent T.S. DeHaviland

Alan Greenspan, speaking on NPR’s occasional segment “The Long View” late last year, again perpetuated the dangerous myth that the gap between the rich and poor in this country is due to a lack of highly educated and highly skilled workers. There is no doubt that we lack them, of course: shortages loom in nursing, engineering, and teaching, among other fields. But only one of those professions pays particularly well; that would be engineering wherein top candidates in hot fields such as chemical engineering can start at nearly six figures. But nurses and teachers generally make between $40k and $60k depending on the market. Head nurses or surgical nurses or other specialists might make closer to or even above $100,000 a year, but one does not get into those sorts of positions overnight: they go to the most experienced and most highly qualified. These are decent salaries, to be sure, but they have little to do with the income gap, with the top tier of the executive class bringing in tens of millions in compensation and bonuses every year,
not to mention the higher-ups in the investment class whose incomes reach into the hundreds of millions per annum.

Just having a degree won’t make you rich, but having an MBA probably will. With my MFA in Creative Writing, I am just as highly educated as an MBA–maybe more since the program I went through was designed to be terminal. But even though I possess an abundance of those written and oral communication skills ostensibly much sought-after by Big Business, that has somehow still failed to allow me to hob-nob at the Ferrari dealer with the truly well-to-do.

How far off the mark Greenspan is can be further illustrated when one considers what relatively unskilled but unionized workers once, and sometimes still do, actually make. An experienced, unionized manufacturing worker can make $60,000 or more a year, depending on overtime. So the BSN or a teacher with a master’s degree might actually be earning less than the guy with only a high-school diploma running rivets at the Boeing plant down the street.

Businesses may claim to want highly skilled workers, but they’re almost universally unwilling to pay for them, so people have little incentive to invest in their educations since the payoff, by and large, won’t be worth it, at least not in the 3 to 5 year time frame in which people can practically plan. Further complicating matters, even those highly skilled jobs Greenspan tries to champion are quickly being outsourced, just like manufacturing jobs have been for the past 30 years: insurance companies are sending patients to Thailand and Singapore as cheaper alternatives to expensive medical procedures; teachers are being imported from the Philippines on temporary visas in my home town; and more and more engineering work is being sent to China and India, where even the most highly educated will work for 30% of what an American expects. What would be the point of going $100,000 in hock when the great job you’re going into debt training for is just going overseas anyway?

The real reason for the gap between the rich and poor in this country comes down to good ol’ fashioned greed. The marginal top tax bracket of the 1950s and ‘60s that ran to almost 90% flew in the face of the idea the rich often have that they are not yet rich enough. And Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Congresses both Democratic and Republican over the last quarter decade have all agreed by rewriting the tax code to favor the wealthy (if I made twice what I make, I’d pay the same percentage in taxes; this is true even if I made four times what I now make); eliminating taxes on capital gains; loosening regulations on businesses, banks, and investments; and busting labor unions whenever feasible. This has been tremendously good for the top 1% of income earners, who saw their incomes increase to almost 22% of all income earned in 2005, according to the New York Times, compared to roughly half that in 1980. To be in that top 1%, you’d have to be making about $350,000 a year, or three times what Greenspan’s theoretical highly skilled worker is likely to pull in. Over the same period, those on the bottom have actually seen their wages decline. It doesn’t take a Chairman of the Federal Reserve to figure out what’s going on here, and it’s pretty obvious that merely supplying
the economy with more nurses and teachers and engineers isn’t going to help. The problem is not that we’re not educated enough: roughly 20% of the workforce is  college-educated. The problem is that we’re not being rewarded for what we do, but the people at the very top are being rewarded for what we do.